This activity has benefited from input from faculty educators beyond the author through a review and suggestion process.
This review took place as a part of a faculty professional development workshop where groups of faculty reviewed each others' activities and offered feedback and ideas for improvements. To learn more about the process On the Cutting Edge uses for activity review, see http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/review.html.

This page first made public: Jul 9, 2008

Summary

Three sequential modular exercises introduce geoscience students to the power of GIS and give them experience with the kinds of GIS raster image analysis tasks commonly used by geoscientists. You might also be interested in our Full GIS course with links to all assignments.

Context

Audience

These exercises are part of a GIS Across the Curriculum effort in the
Geology Department at Hamilton College. We use these core exercises in
most of our introductory geoscience courses, and we also use them as
refresher tutorials and introductory workshops for students in our
upper level courses. Completion of the first three exercises is
considered a base level of GIS knowledge for students entering the core
courses for the major.

Related Links

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

None.

How the activity is situated in the course

Because these GIS modules are not content-specific, they can be used at any point in the semester.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

Students will become familiar with a suite of GIS tasks that they will use in other GIS assignments. These include working with DEMs and DRGs, creating and working with hillshades, 3D scenes in ArcScene, and shape files (point, line and polygon), and creating and managing attribute tables. Datums, coordinate systems and file management are addressed as well.

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

Rather than teaching students point-and-click GIS, or techniques without analysis, these exercises teach GIS in the context of solving a geoscience problem or addressing a geoscience question.

Other skills goals for this activity

None.

Description of the activity/assignment

The following three sequential tutorial exercises provide students with
an introduction to and experience with GIS analysis of raster image
data sets.

Mt. St. Helens exercise: Modified from an ESRI Canada activity,
this exercise is designed primarily to be a "hook". It quickly gets
students into ArcMap and gives them a first hand experience in the
power of ArcGIS without bogging them down in background details.
Clinton exercise: Students gain experience in using ArcCatalog,
creating hillshades of DEMs, and working with orthoquads. Although this
exercise is built around the Clinton, NY 7.5' quad, it could be easily
modified for any other quadrangle.
Adirondacks exercise: Students practice skills that they have
learned in previous tutorials and gain experience in working with shape
files. The primary emphasis of the exercise is to analyze the
correlation between topography and bedrock geology in the Adirondacks
region. The tutorial also teaches students how to create a finished map
view. Although the exercise is built around the Adirondack region, it
could be easily modified for any other area where bedrock resistance is
correlated with topography.

All three tutorials are contained in the assignment/activity document
that can be downloaded below. The data sets can be individually
downloaded; even though the data sets are in zipped folders, they are
still large and may take awhile to download.

Determining whether students have met the goals

These tutorials do not have any accompanying assessment. Students are ultimately assessed in later activities and assignments on the basis of whether they can apply what they have learned in the tutorials to new assignments.

October 15-17, 2017
Carleton College, Northfield, MN
To address the need to strengthen computational skills, this workshop will bring together faculty from the sciences who teach computation and are interested in strengthening their skills and developing MATLAB-based teaching resources. Application deadline: September 8, 2017

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Provenance

Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College

Reuse

This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Provenance

Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College

Reuse

This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Provenance

Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College

Reuse

This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Provenance

Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College

Reuse

This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.